The general assessment seems to be that she did some things wrong like imposing Emergency and Operation Blue Star, but that she was brilliant during the 1971 war against Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh. Or that on the whole she was a good, and even a great, leader.
There is a general longing for a strong leader that people imagine her to be in comparison with the run-of-the-mill politicians who crowded the public arena ever since she died and this includes Rajiv Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The communists and the BJP - her main political rivals - have always been grudging admirers of Indira Gandhi's politics. The communists concurred with her socialist populism of the 1969-71 years including bank nationalisation and abolition of privy purses, and the BJP loved her Durga-like role in the 1971 war.
The two had opposed the imposition of Emergency in 1975. Condemning Indira Gandhi for imposing Emergency is not the way to understand Indira Gandhi or history.
Politicians lack the credibility to assess the Emergency in objective terms. The question they dare not ask is whether there were compelling reasons to impose the Emergency.
The historical evidence shows that the conditions were indeed critical. Jayaprakash Narayan was partly responsible for creating conditions conducive to the imposition of Emergency. He was a woolly-headed Gandhian and an irresponsible anarchist who wanted to dissolve the state.
As a person at the helm of the state at that moment, Indira Gandhi had to hit back. If she had truly been a leader, she would not have been frightened by the silly antics of JP and his followers who let loose enough mayhem on the streets between June 12 and June 25 when Emergency was imposed.
Instead of holding her nerve and displaying the steely resolve which everyone now thinks she had, Indira Gandhi panicked. The Allahabad high court verdict would have been overturned in the Supreme Court. Every legal expert worth the salt knew it to be a flimsy judgment. But she did not trust the system and she did not trust herself.
So, she succumbed to bad advice from the likes of Siddharh Shankar Ray and brought in the infamous 39th Constitutional amendment, taking away the power of the courts to decide election cases involving the President, vice president, prime minister and Lok Sabha speaker. The Emergency is a classic example of Indira Gandhi's bad leadership qualities.
The thing with Indira Gandhi was that she did not believe in anything strongly. She did not believe in socialism. She used it as a useful weapon in her fight against the Syndicate. She abandoned it without qualms when she returned to power the second time round in 1980.
She was not much of a dictator either because she was not comfortable with the Emergency. Remember that a majority of the middle class loved the Emergency and were happy that the trains were on time. As a matter of fact, the sneaking admiration of the
Indian middle class for Indira Gandhi as a strong leader is a secret longing for a dictator. It was the poor people who hated this dictatorship and voted her out in 1977. In fact, she seemed quite relieved that she lost the election.
The mettle of a leader is tested in bad, and not in good, times. Indira Gandhi fails the test. She was a bad leader because she had no convictions, she could not handle a crisis and she could not deal with critics. More importantly, she lacked the ability to build a team of talented people in the party and in the government. She wanted trusted lieutenants and she had plenty of them around. But leadership is not about followers.